We’ve spent most of the past several years listening to liberals nattering away about how first Iraq and now Afghanistan is the new Vietnam. But finally, those making such arguments in the hope of undermining our efforts to resist the Taliban have a leg to stand on, even if a proper understanding of this episode leads to conclusions they don’t like.

Today’s front-page story in the New York Times about the efforts of American diplomat Peter W. Galbraith to depose the president of Afghanistan last year ought to set our collective Vietnam-analogy alarm bells ringing. According to United Nations officials, it appears that Galbraith tried to enlist the Obama White House in a plan to oust Afghan President Hamid Karzai last summer. Galbraith appears to think that Karzai is too corrupt to be a plausible leader of that country and tried to use the wholesale fraud committed to secure the president’s re-election to convince Obama to throw our Afghan ally under the proverbial bus. Galbraith was right about the level of fraud, but his position as the No. 2 UN official in Afghanistan did not entitle him to play kingmaker, let alone be the moving force behind what amounts to a plot that aimed at some sort of coup d’état. Galbraith, a protégé of Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s top Afghanistan envoy, was fired in the aftermath of his attempt to force a change in government. He claims he only discussed such a plan but did not actively promote it.

Read on.

Confucius, Œc. Vol.

Don’t ask impertinent questions like that jackass Adept Lu.